The tears must flow

Colleen Hoover and unruly genres

Back in January, I posted the following note about Colleen Hoover on…well, Notes, I guess. It received a lot of engagement, as you can see, so I figured I might as well milk that a little further here on the newsletter! Juice those numbers, Adam.

Here is what I was reaching toward: there is, among the cultural mavens and literati and Charlie-Day-at-the-corkboard neo-Gramscians of today a tendency to with culture, with content, as widely as possible, in the effort of gleaning some insight into the forces at work today. Literature and philosophy, yes, and film and fashion, and also shoddy horror movies, reality TV, TikTok memes, Netflix series, and so on and so forth. There is, in certain subsections of what could be called ‘trash’ content, a vitality, a glimpse into the forces and spirits animating our age.

I am all for that! Send me your deconstructions of beige decor in the spatial imaginary of the Real Mormon Moms of New Zion, Utah. I am interested! I will read faithfully! Yet, it seems to me, that many of those same mavens who will gladly binge six seasons of reality TV over the weekend would never read a popular commercial novel like, say, one by Colleen Hoover. This struck me as strange. Do such novels not offer similar grist for the cultural mills? Are their audiences more siloed? Or does it simply take more attention to read a trashy novel than to watch a trashy show, and our time is already at a premium?

But, I had to admit to myself, I wasn’t practicing what I preached. I hadn’t read any of Madame Hoover’s works myself, and was thus speculating baselessly. So, being the brave critic that I am, I went ahead and read one of Hoover’s books, and now return to you, dear readers, to tell the tale.

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Quick sketch: Colleen Hoover is an author who found massive success through self-publishing her own books. She started doing that about a decade ago, but her sales really took off during the pandemic, when housebound readers were desperate for distraction. Hoover’s books, easy to read with familiar plots and characters, fit the bill perfectly. Eventually, this led to It Ends With Us, perhaps her most widely-read book, getting adapted into a movie starring Blake Lively and, uh, Justin Baldoni. That’s a whole story I won’t go into.¹

Hoover’s books always feature romance and relationships as driving forces for the plot. She also started in self-publishing, and she’s, well, a woman, and those factors have led to her getting slotted into the ‘romance’ category when it comes to genre classification. Cause romance sells! Marketers know how to package the genre to readers, which is literally the hardest thing to do in publishing today. But as I’ll discuss below, Hoover is not a romance author. Her books are too unwieldy, too untidy, to fit that tag.

The Hoover book I chose to read is called Verity. It is something of an outlier in Hoover’s oeuvre. (Say that three times fast.) Hoover herself acknowledges this in the acknowledgments, where she writes, in direct address to the reader, “It’s a departure from the emotional love stories I usually write, so I very much appreciate you coming on this journey with me.” It is also, to use language I doubt she’d use, kind of literary, or at least literary-ish. The basic setup is something that, say, Sara Gran might write, working in that smart-thriller lane. This is precisely what made me choose this book for my initiation into the Hooververse.

Our protagonist for Verity is a woman named Lowen Ashleigh. Lowen is, as her ridiculous name would lead one to believe, a struggling writer. She’s published a few novels that have only sold a couple thousand copies. She is cripplingly shy, which means that she can’t appear in bookstores or post videos to social media, thus dooming her to obscurity.² Fortune smiles on her, though, when she is contracted by her agent to carry out a plumb assignment, one that could very well save her financially.

Verity Crawford is a bestselling author of thrillers, all of which are told from the villain’s perspective. (Think Caroline Kepnes’ You, adapted into the Netlfix series starring Penn Badgley.³ This is intended: Hoover also thanks Kepnes in the acknowledgments.) Before Verity could finish the last volumes in her series, however, she got in a car crash, one that rendered her vegetative and unresponsive. Verity’s publisher, desperate to keep milking that cash cow, is looking for an author who could finish the remaining books, working from Verity’s notes and outlines, in a kind of Robert Jordan-Brandon Sanderson situation. Lowen, improbably, lands the gig.

To complete her assignment, Lowen goes to the Crawford home in the Vermont countryside. There, she finds Jeremy, Verity’s husband, and their son, Crew. (Crew! Great name, honestly—perfect summation of the Live Love Laugh milieu. Gotta give you that one, CoHo.) Verity herself is confined to a hospital bed in an upstairs room. Lowen gets to work, trawling through Verity’s papers and outlines…until she finds…what looks like an autobiography? Written by Verity? One that recounts, in terms that recall 50 Shades of Grey, Verity’s early relationship with Jeremy, as well as…secrets? Dark passions? Murder?

You see where is going. Verity reveals itself to work as a domestic gothic, complete with a mousy heroine who falls for the grieving husband.

But I sense you, reader, raising your hand to ask a question. “Is Hoover, you know, a good writer?” Good as in the sense of literary, or literary-ish. A writer who displays artistry, or even just competence, at the level of the sentence, the paragraph, the page. And the answer to that is: no, not especially. Hoover deliberately writes prose that is, in terms of grammar if certainly not content, apprehensible at a fourth grade reading level. (She is much like the aforementioned Brando Sando in that regard.) A brief example:

He looks back at me, and he doesn't even have to say why he was angry at her. He thinks she hit the tree on purpose.

It's quiet in the room. in the house. He's not even breathing.

Eventually, he scoots back in his chair and stands. I stand up with him because I feel like that's the first time he’s ever admitted this to anyone. Maybe even to himself. I can tell he doesn't want me to see what he's thinking, because he turns away from me and clasps his hands behind his head.

You sure can tell what’s going on!

And yes, the death of reading, No Reader Left Behind, the YA-ification of everything. Blah blah blah. I’m not going to try to present Hoover as some secret genius. Neither does she, I’d add. But I will say, I do find it interesting how widely Hoover is read. I think she is meeting a felt need in the culture that often gets dismissed. And that has everything to do with genre.

Hoover, as mentioned, often gets labeled as a romance writer, for obvious reasons. But she does not write romances! Her characters endure far too much trauma for that genre. No, Hoover writes melodramas. Or, to put it more colloquially, tearjerkers.

Tearjerkers occupy an uncertain, unsteady place in the culture. Many audiences want them, as Hoover’s success testifies, but the culture industry seems less than interested in satisfying that need. Heather Havrilesky, writing in the New York Times, pleaded with Hollywood to bring back the tearjerker, to let audiences cry in the dark again. Yet such pleas struggle to overcome a suspicion that the melodrama, the tearjerker, is a regressive, retrograde genre.

Think of the current romance boom. Authors like Emily Henry and Casey McQuiston have found huge success by writing romance novels that hit all the beats of the genre, while also maintaining an overall outlook that could be called progressive, empowering, feminist—you name the adjective. Gay happy endings take down the patriarchy. This allows romance to achieve mass appeal along with a certain kind of cultural cache, wherein op-eds about the liberatory power of romance can appear in major newspapers and magazines.

But the melodrama, the tearjerker, struggles mightily to evade the suspicion that, by making its heroines slog through such horrors on the way to some sort of happy ending (and actually, the ending of Verity is quite ambivalent, with Lowen morally compromised even in her idyllic life), it is, at some level, old-fashioned. Out of touch. Perhaps, even, conservative. That, far more than her subpar prose style, is what accounts for the hostility to Hoover. She’s not just bad. She’s bad for you.

And yet—the melodrama does offer an emotional experience that other, tidier genres simply can’t. Place the form in the hands of a great artist and you get Twin Peaks. David Lynch drew on horror and surrealism, yes, but he also drew on melodrama equally, on the weepies that filled movie screens during the 1950s when he was a child. Lynch is also an artist who’s been accused of harboring retrograde views, and not without evidence. He is also the great American artist of his generation.

So no, Colleen Hoover, is not a great writer, or even a particularly good one. But give her credit for working in a genre that all but invites derision, and doing so without apology. That is one trait of hers worth admiring.

1. Friend of the stack BDM summed up the whole thing well.

2. Verity was published in 2018. Had it been written five years later, Lowen almost certainly would have had a Substack.

3. Is Gossip Girl secretly the great incubator of talent in the 21st century? The Little Review for the streaming era?